About Indiancine.ma

Indiancine.ma is an annotated online archive of Indian film. It is intended to serve as a shared resource for film scholars and enthusiasts in India and beyond.

Since 1931 to date, India has made around 50,000 sound films. Official figures suggest that around 4.4% of all films made exist in archival conditions. On the other hand, it is likely that low-end sector, including 16 mm, VHS, VCD and DVD, might have 15,000 sound films, i.e. 30%, across the Indian cinema’s history, and across regions.

Indiancine.ma has been initiated by Pad.ma, and is operated in collaboration with a number of organisations and film studies institutions. These include:

At present, Indiancine.ma is being utilised as a backbone structure for several research projects on Indian film, including a project for an 'Annotated Repository on the Art Cinemas of India" being conducted by the University of Chicago Center in Delhi, a project on the Left and the early Malayalam cinema being overseen by Prof. Satish Poduval of the English & Foreign University, a repository for precious historical print holdings on the history of Tamil and Telugu cinemas being assembled by Samyuktha P.C. (Chennai) and Dr. S.V. Srinivas (Bangalore), and a project on early Bengali films at the Media Lab, Jadavpur. A general focus at the moment is on out-of-copyright films, currently pre-1954.

Indiancine.ma is still under construction, and is always open to contributions from cinephiles, scholars and students alike. For a quick introduction to using the website, please take a look the Help section.